(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method for analyzing and utilizing intellectual property information. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for analyzing and utilizing intellectual property information that extracts intellectual property information and provides it to a research center immediately upon such information being made public. This enables easy management and analysis of intellectual property information, and makes it easy to utilize the analyzed intellectual property information.
(b) Description of the Related Art
A patent is a government-issued document that confers some special right or privilege, namely to exclude others from using, manufacturing or selling the claimed invention. These rights are given for a specified period of time. In return, the claimed invention is made public, and in so doing, the pace of development and progress in science and art is increased.
Accordingly, patents provide patentees with property rights. That is, through the protection given to patents, an inventor is given a monopoly on a claimed invention (or more precisely, the right to exclude others from the claimed invention) for a specified time period, thereby recognizing the value of an intangible asset. Hence, such intangible assets are referred to as intellectual property.
Conventional systems for managing intellectual property include filing management systems, intellectual property original document extraction systems, and patent analysis systems. Although intellectual property encompasses a wide scope of subjects, these conventional systems will be described in more detail with reference to patents, as they are the most common type of intellectual property.
(1) Filing Management Systems
Filing management systems are used in large companies and patent law firms. These systems accumulate data of dates and particulars of patent filing with respect to the sequential procedures of filing, publishing, examination, and registration.
(2) Intellectual Property Original Document Extraction Systems
These systems use programs, which have been commercialized through user interface improved systems for enabling access to original documents and easy searching, to extract patent information text files or image files in websites that offer free patent original documents such as the USPTO website.
(3) Patent Analysis Systems
Patent analysis systems extract related patents using keywords in DABS such as DIALOG, ORBIT, and QPAT in order to draft patent maps and analyze prior art, automatically perform quantitative analyses of the extracted patents, and accumulate analyzed data. Such patent analysis systems are widely used.
However, a major drawback of such systems as described above is that they are designed and programmed without any consideration to the whole processes. For example, if a patent is researched only once when patent information is necessary, the chance of a patent dispute increases because information on patents of ever-increasing development may be missed. Further, without the thorough investigation into prior art, the possibility of making an investment in a pre-existing technology increases.
In addition, in preparing patent maps, it is difficult to obtain important information using only the analysis of quantitative data. With conventional analysis systems, particular emphasis is placed on quantitative data. Particularly with the above systems, no exchange or feedback is performed with research centers that play an important role in intellectual property such that the accumulation of precise information is not possible.